I’ve decided I just have to accept the fact that I am a SLOB and own that. I’m a slob about my office; I get written up by Safety for having too many papers stacked up on my desk. I’m a slob about my yard; I can’t keep the flower beds weeded. And my house is a mess now too. And my hair is usually a mess and my makeup is never quite right and my shirts come untucked and and and. So I’m a quadruple slob and I feel like I fail at being an adult. Fat loser messy slob who probably should be sent to re-education to try to learn how not to be such a slob. Really, what it would take is giving up all my hobbies and staying over an extra hour per day in my office to sort and file, and taking an hour at home to clean or do yardwork. And devoting my entire weekends to cleaning and yardwork. I think the hair is a lost cause short of having a regular hairdresser.)

This self-criticism ignores one of the basic facts of life: people who routinely complain about one’s lack of neatness inevitably prove to be anal all the way to the peritoneum, and maybe beyond. These are not people you are bound to respect; the fact that they have been installed in the seats of power means nothing more than that the contemporary power structure, with its emphasis on collective “responsibility” at individual expense, needs to be burned to the ground and the ground subsequently covered with sodium chloride. But we already know that, right?

I mean, without bankrupting oneself or losing one’s job due to the time and energy involved in things like filing lawsuits and parking oneself in people’s offices and stuff. I just want to be left alone but I don’t have the energy or cojones to work at taking down the power structure.

Being polite and deferential is not working and I am not good at being mean and bitchy.